After local election boards threw out thousands of voter registration challenges submitted by Republican activists, the State Election Board is considering asking lawmakers to pass legislation that could make such challenges more difficult to dismiss.
The board’s executive director, Mike Coan, reported Tuesday on a board-ordered probe into how eight counties — a majority of which are Democratic-leaning — handle challenges. County election officials in metro Atlanta have dismissed more than 45,000 challenges since July 1.
Republican activists have challenged the eligibility of voters who they believe have moved, died or aren’t eligible; Democrats say the data cited in these attempts to cancel registrations is inaccurate and could disenfranchise voters.
“It appears there is a systematic denial of vote challenges, especially when there is a large batch of challenges,” Coan said.
Coan said challengers have “far superior technology” than election offices have. But state Rep. Saira Draper, D-Atlanta, pushed back, saying challenges often rely on unreliable and outdated data that is aggregated from publicly available online sources.
Georgia routinely removes outdated voter registrations through a biennial list maintenance process it used last year to cancel the registrations of 189,000 voters.
Partisan activists have taken advantage of state laws passed in the wake of the 2020 presidential election that empower voters to challenge the eligibility of an unlimited number of potentially ineligible voters, but many challenges are dismissed by county election officials for lacking sufficient evidence to uphold the challenges. Challengers often rely on outdated national address change data and third-party sources that aggregate publicly available data.
